He idolized Pasternak, packed stadiums and travelled to New York to meet Ronald Reagan at height of the Cold War.

Andrei Voznesensky was a mere student when he sent some of his poems to Boris Pasternak, the celebrated poet and author of Doctor Zhivago. When Pasternak invited him for a visit, his path was cemented. “From that day on,” Voznesensky wrote later, “my life took on a magical meaning and a sense of destiny; his new poetry, telephone conversations, Sunday chats at his house from 2 to 4, walks — years of happiness and childish adoration.”

Voznesensky was born in 1933. He became an adored celebrity himself during the decade of liberalization that followed Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, filling Moscow stadiums with as many as 14,000 people for readings.

Why did he become one of the Soviet Union's most famous artists? “For one thing,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1987, “he reads magnificently, by all accounts (and the accounts are worldwide): like music, it is said . . . the stretched, resonating vowels, the assonance, the modulations of pitch, the extraordinary intensity.” The other reason, of course, was the poems themselves. They were complicated, but their innovative rhythms, striking metaphors and rare emotional depth resonated with the educated public.

Voznesensky avoided denouncing the government in verse. He nonetheless came under attack: from critics, some of whom found his work needlessly difficult, and from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who castigated him for ignoring the ideological style known as socialist realism. In 1962, Reuters reported, Khrushchev summoned him for a “public flogging in front of the gloating party elite.” Khrushchev reportedly said: “You want to get a (foreign) passport tomorrow? . . . Then go away, go to the dogs!”

Khrushchev's successors allowed Voznesensky to travel to Europe and the U.S., where he met with Allen Ginsberg and Ronald Reagan while serving, the New York Times wrote, “as a sort of unofficial Kremlin cultural envoy.” He never, however, managed to stay out of trouble for long. He drew government ire in 1967 when he lambasted the literary bureaucracy, in 1968 when he challenged the invasion of Czechoslovakia, then again in the 1970s over an unsuccessful effort by several leading writers to publish a book of censored material.

It was the strength of his poems that always saved him. Despite Voznesensky’s outspokenness, the government distributed his work widely; collections featuring works like “Parabolic Ballad” (“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies/Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow”) and “Chagall’s Cornflowers” (“In a field of grain, add a patch of sky/Man lives by sky alone”) sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Voznesensky died Tuesday at 77.

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